Ramblings of the Mad Man in Beaverdam

Monthly Archives: August 2018

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Some people have scoffed when I said I used baling twine as a fence…

Well I took the fence down and rolled it up and let the horses into the forbidden zone this morning. Photo below of the rolled up “fence”.

It works because my stock is accustomed to a good HOT fence.

It was only about 70 or 80 feet of excluded area….but even the goats had not crossed the single strand “fence”

Below is what was fenced out and the horses were sampling the new found goodies. Even Perkins came out for the taste test but the horse flies sent him prancing back to the stable and Condi soon followed…Pete endured another five minutes or so and he went to the stable as well.

The donkeys sought out the sunflowers…Perkins like the Sun Hemp and cow pea leaves because they were easy to chew with his old teeth. Condi pulled on a Cow Pea vine and pulled about six feet of vine out of the millet. The vine startled her and she pranced around dragging the vine, until she decided to eat it. Pete concentrated on the pearl millet…

Saw this device at a clients horse farm this morning. It is a fly trap for biting flies. They were very happy with it and felt is had really reduced the horse fly population and caught many stable flies as well. There was a couple of inches of dead flies in it and several who were dying…

Here is a shot of morning day two of access to the new stuff. It is interesting and unusual that they are staying in the short stuff and eating the new stuff from the top down,. The goats and cows however go into the middle and eat from the inside out. Yesterday afternoon the goats were hidden in this patch eating…I could hear their bells. When I grabbed the camera to snap this shot, Condi was standing in the short stuff grazing at head height, but when she saw me she took off for the stable for her breakfast. Yeah she and the others get a token handout morning and night when Perkins gets his sustenance.

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It is all the fault of Facebook. It is so easy to post a photo and knock out a quick blurb about the photo.

I confess that I have been victim of the allure. But finally I realized that in writing and opinions I am not a man of few words and I tire quickly of trying to communicate on a virtual tiny keyboard with my mangled and misshapen fingers……….That leaves me trying to type with a stylus and argue with auto correct about what I am typing and it is frustrating beyond belief.

So having some things to say I realized that I have a blog and it is easy and non limiting…takes a few more minutes to set it up but so much more satisfying than auto correct on Facebook.

Relative to the misshapen fingers, I realized this morning that Naproxen Sodium and Instaflex Plus is what is keeping me functioning. I forgot to take them last night and awoke with great pain in my hand and wrist this morning from the Rheumatoid Arthritis. The worst of my two bad knees was also making itself known. Thirty minutes after taking them I was again functional….Won’t forget them again…

I am not quite dead yet in spite of my advancing age….I was in tractor supply yesterday and ran across a good price on some protein supplement tubs. I asked a young man who worked there if they had a way for me to get one of these to my truck….100 lb tubs. He brought out a cart and I lifted one off the stack and put it on the cart and he followed me and my shopping buggy through the checkout line and to the van….I saw him looking at the tub…just looking and not moving…I picked it up and set it in the van….he just looked at me. I said, “I bet you didn’t think I could do that.” He said, “No, I was hoping you would help me because I knew that I could not do that.”

Anyhow to the cause for this missive.

I often advise folks to use portable electric fence for pasture division and grazing management….I get a lot of funny looks…Portable electric fence is basically one or two electric wires or polywire or poly tape or polyrope suspended on step in plastic posts.

I also advise folks to use the same setup to create travel lanes between the aforementioned grazing paddocks. More funny looks..

I try to draw out layouts and get more funny looks.

So yesterday while walking down a temporary travel lane that Marie and I put up in the mid nineties….I stopped and snapped a couple of photos of it….She and I put this lane up way back then for some reason long since forgotten in order to make her livestock management easier while I was travelling for work. She and I put it up in about a half hour before I left for some out of state destination. It has been so useful that it still exists today….this was when we first started managing grazing and back then it was for the cows as we did not have horses until 2003 when I got Val and Junior.

One side of this lane was a paddock we had fenced off for grazing management….I took a couple of pieces of 2 inch PVC pipe about five feet long and using a block of wood as a cap hammered them into the ground….creating an insulated post. This works but I have since discovered that it is easier to drive a steel Tee post into the ground and simply slide the 2 inch PVC over the post making a good strong corner for poly wire.

I used the same trick to hammer some sections of 3/4 inch PVC in as line posts.

We created the lane by moving over about ten feet and doing the same thing. On this side we used what we had available, which was step in posts and poly tape.

Been there for over 25 years and still functioning. Here is a shot of the lane. the left side paddocks have been grazed and mowed and had fall multi species cover crop broadcast on them in the last two weeks. The paddock on the right side will be grazed in a week or two.

My horses are so accustomed to electric fence that I can now use baling twine as electric fence and they will honor it. I am using a piece of baling twine today as a horse fence. My guess is that the goats will pretty quickly figure it out as they are not afraid to test their limits.

No photo of this but I finally have the goats in with the horses. Since Star Baby is no longer in residence all I had to do was see if Condi would tolerate them. Perkins absolutely does not care and Pete is pretty easy to get along with. Jonah does not love the goats but he does not bother them. Condi says as long as they stay out of her groceries she could not give a rip. So I rigged them up a place in the stable where they could escape the equines if necessary and they have resided with the horses for two days now. It has actually helped in making the two goats that I got last year more sociable. I can now easily touch them, where they have always been skittish and standoffish. Nelly has long been an in your pocket goat and is constantly investigating my clothes for something edible. I wanted them with the horses to address some of the weeds that the horses will not touch. The goats have gone right to work on them…I have enough weeds to keep twice as many goats’ busy full time…next year by this time we should have a few more goats.

Speaking of Condi, we went up to Brunson’ this week to try out Amanda’s obstacles. I took Condi and Stewart brought his mare Samosa. Condi and I just walked thru them and she did pretty good…Amanda had a remote control car that she drove around the horses….Condi did not like it at first but then I was driving it and we went all over the arena with Condi following it…Another obstacle was pool noodles sticking out of some barrels. Condi would go thru them okay but when they touched her hind legs she hurried thru them..

So we hung some pool noodles in the stable over the weekend. When Condi saw the first one she left the stable…but after I hung it she came right back to investigate…now she has to stand between two of them to get her groceries. She adapted pretty quick.

Perkins uses them to keep the flys off…not much bothers that old boy.

The only other obstacle that bothered her was the bubble machine….she did not act foolish and was listening to me throughout….but she could not figure out those bubbles…Once she figures something out she accepts it.

I could wave the flag all around her and over her and no problem. I even covered her whole head with the flag and she just stood there.